Google is a bubble in and of itself. It has the potential to do as much harm to the tech sector as the Internet bubble of 1999/2000.
Before I get into it, let me say that I don't like Google and I stay away from them. I personally do not trust them.
I've worked around organizations with enormous power and access to information and an almost infinite ability to process it and correlate every Bit contextually - power so awesome, that it should have caused fear. It didn't. All that power was moderated and tempered by the strongest sense of right and wrong I have ever seen - parallel to an implicit set of rules and behaviors designed to error on the side of respect for individual privacy and the rule of law. I don't have the same sense about Google and I don't think their interests are consistent with my own. Subjective? You bet, but this is just an opinion.
I don't know much about Google - except that they don't ask - they don't ask for permission to use my or any other person's IP. The crawl it, aggregate it and sell it for huge profits they do not automatically share with the owners of that content.
I suspect that specialization of information into focused silos is going to be their undoing. Context is very important and when one considers that the opportunities in and frankly the need for specialization, is growing - it is likely to canalize how different types of information is stored, searched and accessed. Simply, powerful organizations are going to catch on and wish to benefit from "their" content - every medical discipline has very powerful lobbies and a keen interest in preserving the integrity of the information produced by their members. That's just one example. Every form of engineering is similar.
I think the Internet is in transition - where it will evolve and become more like a library where specialization will be key - not all technologies apply equally well in identical ways across all forms of information and the Internet is no different.
The desktop and the server will be more important than ever in what will emerge as a more effective Internet - it will still expand, but there will be more structure and more focus with specific tools and means of leveraging that information.
To share what I mean, I look back on a time when machine processing became widely available in government information gathering. It was a mess. Decision makers were inundated with data - some of it looked great, but it was all too much. Worse, despite an enormous amount of collection, too few people had access to information that was already available and re-tasking for yet more collection was common. It was so wasteful.
I was fortunate to have had a hand in reversing that and devised a means that was agnostic as to system, or network type and built solutions that produced information as products - most simply, information that one could use to make a decision. The Internet itself has to evolve in perhaps similar ways - where as Microsoft says, it is about finding and not searching.
Well, they're right, but it is more about what one finds and how it affects things that matters even more. Probably most of us that read and write things share a similar opportunity - the people that come to us, hire us and trust us are not looking for a menu of options - they are not looking for a waiter, and a cook [using an analogy I have used before], they are looking for answers and solutions - they need a chef that is also a nutritionist. The Internet will evolve exactly like this - all other professions have and so will ours. Search will consist of specialized, focused tools for interacting with information by discipline. In that world, Google has less of a role.
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